According to freedictionary, Environmentalism is advocacy for or work toward protecting the natural environment from destruction or pollution. Lately, we here a lot of talk on the subject about saving our planet from human caused problems so we can keep on living and there is a lot of talk on what needs to be done. Sounds good right? Well, talk is cheap and saving the planet isn’t. Economics is the main factor of why nothing tends to get done when we try and go about preserving our planet while we still have the chance. Many skeptics of environmentalism say that there’s no way of preventing global warming, wilderness destruction, and promoting ecologically friendly business without shutting down or destroying the economy. My question is then, what actions could be taken by Americans that are both ecologically and economically reasonable.

A common belief of people is that the government should protect the environment and to a certain extent they do, but they also use their land to fund their projects and use national parks for oil, timber, and are very lenient on dumping there. Collette Ridgeway, marketing assistant for the Institute of Humane Studies at George Mason University and writer of “Privately Protected Places”, says that people should be in charge of protecting the environment. She gives the example of Jasper Cates, a man from Northern Maine who, when developers were planning on destroying the woods that he loved, gathered funding, support, and eventually bought the land so it wouldn’t be developed (Ridgeway). That land is now open to certain people and it remains much more beautiful and secluded than the government protected national park that was very close to that area (Ridgeway). She also goes on to say that there are many people who either privately own or work with local nature conservancies to protect and preserve the land in their area (Ridgeway). There are many nature conservancies across the country that does the same thing. Buy and preserve land at a local level instead of the big men in Washington controlling everything without crucial information that the people at the local level possess. Unfortunately most people aren’t as lucky to save all of the land in their areas because of lack of money.

Despite most people having a lack of monies, there are still many things people can do to help the environment on a small budget. Nina Rao, writer of “The Oxymoron of Green Consumption” and activist for the non-profit organization “Zero Population Growth”, says that if you really want to preserve the planet all you need to do is follow the old saying of recycle, reduce, and reuse (Rao). She critiques facts like how recycling has gone up dramatically in recent years, but the population has increased, and consumption has also increased, so we’re just recycling the higher amount that we consume (Rao). To Rao, America’s consumption culture is the main problem to the environment today and the problem with that is the media almost makes it seem unpatriotic not to buy as much as possible, “The bottom line is this: buy, buy, buy. Do it for your happiness; do it for your country” (Rao).

Nina Rao’s solution to this problem, quit buying stuff. “Our very culture is based on consumption. We have more sales than holidays. We spend our weekends in malls. No museum is complete without a gift shop” (Rao). Buying less would significantly reduce waste, which is also the next step. “The U.S. does have a reuse culture. Garage sales, flea markets, and antique auctions, all American institutions, are proof of this” (Rao). This doesn’t mean go buy lots of stuff next door every time a garage sales pops up, she means that we should take care of the stuff we do buy so we don’t have to buy a new one and create all that waste. The final step is recycling, normally this is the first thing that enters peoples minds when it comes to making their environmental conscious free again, but this is an expensive and still rarely used tool. The other two actions need to be used more often so recycling actually occurs less. These two actions can be taken into consideration by not competing with other people. Rao writes, “People identify their needs by what they see around them”. This means not keeping up with the neighbor’s new purchase and buying less. We always have to have the next best computer because our neighbor does, just like how people in India need to have the next best typewriter like their neighbor does (Rao). Her simple “three R’s plan” is disliked by anti-environmentalists though, because lowering consumption spending would hurt the American economy.

The three R’s plan (Rao) and privately protecting property (Ridgeway) are all well and good, but an article written by Walter Truett Anderson, an activist with a PhD in Political Science, is a bit more cynical about the whole “lets go back to nature idea” with his article published in Mother Earth magazine “There’s No Going Back to Nature”. He gives his opinion that “many of us would like to see human beings live much more like the way we did 15,000 years ago” (Anderson) and that there’s no way to do that with almost seven billion people on this planet. And to refute Ridgeway’s idea of supporting more Nature Conservancies, he says that just buying up land and not doing anything with it as long as developers and corporations don’t get their hands on it is bad too because then it’ll just overgrow and we’ll have more problems. He does offer some humanistic actions that need to happen even if it hurts the economy and people’s pocketbooks a little.

The best action to take right now, according to Anderson, is to take care of our land and actively manage it with unfortunately expensive information technologies. This means monitoring wildlife, ozone problems, and making active changes to the wilderness like letting cattle trample fields and fertilizing it so that it grows nicely, but doesn’t overgrow. This article doesn’t think Ridgeway’s free-market plan is good enough, this person thinks “We have to admit to having power, face the impossibility of leaving nature alone, and cultivate our environmentalethics and policies accordingly” (Anderson). He would agree more with Nina Rao’s idea that our consumption culture and government economic policies need to be changed. His solutions to environmental problems are a bit extreme and expensive, but Richard Gilpen and Ali Dale bring up the biggest problem of all.

This essay so far has brought up different solutions to environmental problems and one of the biggest problems to the environment is what the environmentalists call the corporations. Published by Richard Gilpen and Ali Dale, writers for the Red Pepper news journal, in “The Great Greenwash”, go into talking about how some of the biggest and richest companies in the world are now spending more money on looking good to the public than they do on product development. The term Greenwashing means “the act of misleading consumers regarding the environmental practices of a company” (Freedictionary.com). They have many “Deceptive PR Campaigns” designed to give them a good image so when they switch one kind of farming pesticide for one equally dangerous pesticide the public will have no idea who to blame (Gilpen and Dale). They make public media assaults on “tree-huggers”, hold meetings with environmental activists, but leave out all the important details that the activists would otherwise get a say on, and rename all their products to an oxymoron as simple as “ozone friendly aerosols” (Gilpen and Dale). The corporations do all of this because being environmentally friendly is very expensive and lowers profit. The corporations really need to step up if we want to have an ecologically friendly future because all of the government, non-profit organization, and individual financial support in the world won’t make a difference if the biggest contributors to pollution don’t stop.

I hope that I offered some valuable insight on the environment and economics today. All of these articles that I researched seem to have very moderate viewpoints and they all offer some solutions to what needs to be done. Their basic points are to put the environment in the hands of the people (Ridgeway) who consume less than before (Rao) and have the government (Anderson) and corporations (Gilpen and Dale) help them out by giving them money and resources. My personal opinion after reading their views is that since America is one of the richest countries and one of the leading problems in the global environment today we have the power to change and these four articles back me up. They aren’t the only solutions and ways to preserve the planet, but they stuck out the most against the others and summed up the basic idea behind environmentalism: the consumption culture needs to slow down and the big corporations need to stop how they pollute the Earth and then cover it up with flashy ad campaigns. We need to preserve the environment if we want to keep being a part of it.